What do you like best?

Loves it’s accessablity, ease of use. The ability to update at a moment’s notice is refreshing. It allows for me to be offsite if needed and to still get a clear picture of what is going on in my establishment

What do you dislike?

Horrible back office. Unclear reporting. Very difficult to reconcile end of business. It seems as if whomever programmed the end of business reporting has no clue what restaurant owners really need to see and do at the end of day. The product is awesome up front but then becomes completely useless at the end of day stuff. There’s a huge lack of communication between the two tools.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Be wary of its back office. Lavu doesn’t know what to do with it or how to show you properly your end of day reconciliation. There used to be keystroke information available to management which is either gone, removed, or hidden. It takes quite a bit of time to do cash Reconciliations, so unless they show you EXACTLY how to do it when they show up and install the system, you WILL be lost. Even then, the average restaurant owner will have no clue how to read the info. Thank God I have an IT background and computer science background. If you don’t have one of these people handy in your business, I would recommend you spend all the time in the world you can with the installation rep. However, even with all of this being said, I would still recommend this over any other product I have seen. The rest of the experience outweighs the lack of back office clarity. Even though it makes this user’s experience almost too difficult.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

POS, ability to update at a moments notice. Completely secure.

Response from Hilary Wainwright of Lavu

Hi William, thank you so much for the review and your honest feedback. We are sorry to hear that the Lavu back office and end of day tools have been such a frustration. We are working very hard right now on improvements to the software and some updates to address our issues. We appreciate you being a customer and if we can provide any support please don't hesitate to call at 855-528-8457.

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What do you like best?

The optional and forced modifiers make it easier to train staff on our menu variations. We're in between a quick serve and sit-down restaurant, so don't utilize the table layout. Catered events are much easier to create tabs without distracting the customers, while also providing a timeline of hourly sales to help examine scheduling needs.

What do you dislike?

Lavu's main tripping points come in two areas: (1) trying to be an all-encompassing business software, and (2) inefficient or rushed updating its software. Typically, this doesn't affect smaller mom-and-pops, but can be very frustrating for medium or large companies.

For example, available reports are sectioned into New and Version 1 (old). Often, we find that the New reports don't hold all of the information that a business truly needs, and have to resort to the Version 1 reports - which are also slightly incomplete. While the New Reports have snazzy charts to help visualize numbers, an expansion of the available Version 1 reports would have been more helpful. Exporting to Excel could then create the snazzy charts.

I've been in discussion with Lavu, and they've made a few staffing changes to address this. I hope to see good things on the horizon.

Recommendations to others considering the product

This is a good start. Don't look at it, right now, for inventory purposes, but instead for ease of customer use and categorizing your sales.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Having portability with our POS systems, where our registers aren't necessarily tied down, is a good thing. Likewise, the interface is easier for our less tech-savvy customers to adapt.

Having Lavu based off of Apple iPads allows us to use the registers for other features, as well: quick communications, offsite trouble-shooting, or enhanced customer service (directions, cocktail recipes, etc.).

What do you like best?

Lave seems stable we have not been down due to the software only due to our own Internet connection.

What do you dislike?

Splitting tickets is awful, other POS systems allow a drag and drop approach which is much simpler! Inventory is difficult and reports are clunky and missing many things, discounts reports are not intuitive so if there is a problem I can look at the entire receipt. Menus items can't have multiple pricing for different qualities of that item, I have to use forced modifiers, Forced modifier list has no searchable tools so if i need to see smooth that starts with a Z i have to skip tons of pages to get to that item.. Search features should be a basic programing build.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Be cautious!

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

POS that allows ticketing for kitchen, customer and payments!

Response from Hilary Wainwright of Lavu

Hi Greg, Thank you so much for the review and feedback. We are working really hard to make our product better and more intuitive. Updates coming in the next few months should address some of our issues, and I will also provide a copy of your review to our product development team to make sure all of these points are on the roadmap for improvement. We appreciate your business.

What do you like best?

The menu is extremely easy to modify without too much going on for the average user to be capable of accomplishing the main tasks necessary to adjust menu items & prices as well as create new items. Everything is VERY WELL integrated with each other.

What do you dislike?

The company simply needs some time to grow into it's own shoes. I experienced quite a bit of difficulty with the install going through a 3rd party contractor and details of the menu build options with it's own technicians.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Accountability of personnel and cost tracking have become effortless coming from a legacy point-of-sale system. The cloud based Lavu has been extremely capable of handling my needs plus some. Managing tasks from anywhere is a tremendous help.

What do you like best?

There is very little hardware that breaks down. I don't have to call the help desk very often.

It gives me very detailed reports.

What do you dislike?

When I do a void or refund it does not give me an accurate reading. The credit card report from LAVU and the credit card batch report from the credit card company often do not match and is very difficult for our accounting department to get an accurate reading.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

currently we are using LAVU for the POS only.

Response from Hilary Wainwright of Lavu

Thank you for the review. Sounds like you are having some good and bad results with reporting. We are always striving to improve, please don't hesitate to call us 24/7 at 855-767-5288 so we can try and help get things working better.

What do you like best?

The interface is nice and easy to navigate. But once you push the buttons that's where everything goes down hill...

What do you dislike?

Everything else! Whenever we have a issue they send it to the "developmental team" also known as the black hole. When we signed up they said "offline processing was in the works" that was 2 years ago. Reports are literally ALWAYS wrong. If you look at sales on two different reports they never are the same. For a span of about three months they miscalculated sales tax, having us over pay hundreds of dollars! For a long time they randomly doubled numbers on server reports, and now there is a random .50 added to numbers on servers reports. I have a tax background an I informed them the liability they were putting on us and our servers by misreporting so they showed me on the IRS website where they were right, THEY SET UP THERE SYSTEM BASED OFF THE WRONG PART OF THE IRS CODE. Not to mention that it randomly opens tickets from all different times that we have to re-close and I'm not sure we get paid for them or not. When we call customer support they are really nice, but our issues always get sent to the "Developmental Team" to never be heard about again!

Recommendations to others considering the product

My background is in tax accounting and I can tell you LAVU is liability if you're not double checking your reports. You have to call monthly to figure out which report is giving your true sales, b/c it changes. Currently one report double counts discounts, and it has been like that for months, I told them and no one changed it.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

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